If all goes as planned then a new site design should go live tonight. The change is not an really big one in aesthetics but rather a complete rewrite of the site's code and methodology for laying things out. The biggest aesthetic change is that the 160px width left column is being moved over to the far right side. This will make sure that our content is the first thing your eyes naturally see first rather than an ad. Other changes include eliminating unnecessary layout images.

The BIG change in the new design is that we are ditching the crazy nested tables normally used in old-school website designs. The new site is completely done via CSS2 and the goal is to make it totally W3C valid. What this means is that future site design changes will be VERY easy to do and that the site layout should be the same in all modern browsers on all platforms. It also will scale better with viewing on PDAs and cellphones. The added bonus is that the new method should also be quite a bit lighter in code which will, in turn, help with load times and server load. (btw: we handled the recent frontpage Digg.com traffic pretty well. I had been waiting for something like that to give me some high traffic data to work with for site optimization. )

After the site design goes live I will be posting a new review from Twizted on the Aspire X-Pleasure Case.

Here is a preview of what it will look like (there are a few tweaks to be added still):

Attached Thumbnails

 

Sorry to bring what up again? I didn;t follow that part.

Yup, we are switching from Arial to Verdana for the first time ever.

Quote: Originally Posted by GlitterKill Sorry to bring what up again? I didn;t follow that part. Yup, we are switching from Arial to Verdana for the first time ever.

oh, i was talking about how i always bring up the part that you're using "new fonts"......


i remember last time when you asked for input when this buttons were done ""

and my first observation was exactly the same one ... "oh, new fonts"

Ahhh ok. The current buttons are staying though.

Looks good and good luck with the cutover, they are always "fun"

I like the cleaners layout.... kodos bro....

Looks good. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Looks good GK looking foward to seeing the new changes..

Haha, 2021 PMs! I like the white to blue gradient going across the top bar and the minimalist new banner.

EDIT: Actually, I'd like to see a better way of having those thread and review preview popups. Anything like that planned?

looks a lot less cluttered to me, nice work GK =)

Looks sweet. Nice job on that GK

BTW Will this stop the website from going down every morning around 5am? Or is that normal fare?

That's when the site does it's nightly backup. How long is it usually down at that time?

Quote: Originally Posted by GlitterKill That's when the site does it's nightly backup. How long is it usually down at that time?

From 2:30am - 3:00am Pacific time for me

Well its already updated for me, and FYI the menus ie mood, search, smileys, arent showing up right I have to scroll down to see them instead of them popping directly under where they used to be.

Might be cause its not fully updated.

Looks a lot nicer but it seems slower to load and the moods are showing up in the middle of the page (you've got to scroll down to get to them.) I'm having that problem with all the drop down boxes it seems (i.e font, size, color, smilies etc. )

Other than that nice job GK

ho-damn i was scared that something in my FF was fugged up.

Its different, but I'll get used to it....

Want to update GameApex too?

Edit: when i hit the Search thread button at the top of the page, the drop down menu appears too far way for me to click it.

Great new look!

I still need to fix the drop-down menus appearing where they shouldn't... that was soemthing I didn't expect.

I like the new layout much better. Wouldn't have guess it to make that much of a difference but it has for me at least.